The major risk factors for coronary artery diseases are widely recognised. Age and gender have a powerful effect, but are immutable. Hypertension, cigarette smoking, total cholesterol and low density lipoprotein cholesterol double or more the risk.
Other important recognised risk factors are overweight, left ventricular hypertrophy, glucose intolerance, hyperinsulinaemia and physical inactivity (Brach, Cholesterol and coronary heart disease prevention. A transatlantic consensus. European Heart Journal, 1989, 10:702-711; Grundy, Cholesterol and coronary heart disease. Jama, November 1986, Vol. 256:2849-2858; The prospective cardiovascular Munster study: Prevalence and prognostic significance of hyperlipidemia in men with systemic hypertension. Am. J. Card., 1987, 59:9G-17G; Egan et al., Comparative effect of overweight on cardiovascular risk in younger versus older men. Am. J. Card., February 1991, Vol. 67:248-252).
Further epidemiological studies have shown that for some cardiovascular diseases such as hypertension, assessment requires consideration of a multivariate risk profile (W. Kannel et al., Office assessment of coronary candidates and risk factor insights from the Framingham study. J. of Hypertension, 1991, 9 (Suppl. 7):S13-S19; K. Anderson et al., An updated coronary risk profile. Circulation, Vol. 83, n.degree. 1, January 1991: 356-362; Prediction of coronary heart disease in Europe. WHO-Erica Project, Erica Research Group, The 2nd European Heart Journal (1991) 12:291-297).
Before starting any therapy for treating coronary artery disease, a complete assessment of overall cardiovascular risk factors is essential. Unfortunately, even where all such cardiovascular risk factors are recorded, there is no existing system for correlating these risk factors with probability of developing coronary heart disease.
The American Heart Association (AHA) (K. Anderson et al., supra) and the WHO-Erica Project (Erica Research Group, supra) give different cardiac heart disease equations to predict the risk for developing coronary heart diseases. However, these mathematical formulas do not provide visualisation of the cardiovascular risks.
It is therefore apparent that there is a need for a device and method to visualise the most important risk factors for each patient for the benefit of the physician and the patient. An object of the present invention is to create a "Cardiovascular Risk Manager (CVRM)". Such a system could be used to evaluate the cardiovascular patient, to estimate his risk profile, to decide the therapeutic approach, and/or to increase the therapeutic compliance of the patient.